SSTI Digest

To grow their local populations and STEM workforce, communities across the country are experimenting with resident/worker attraction programs, as we have previously covered. But how effective are these programs? A recent study from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research offers new insights by analyzing Tulsa Remote’s track record from its inception in 2018 to 2023.  

Tulsa Remote, launched in 2018 with funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, provides $10,000 to eligible remote workers who relocate to Tulsa and commit to stay for at least one year. According to their 2024 economic impact report, Tulsa Remote has attracted 3,475 remote workers, with 96% completing their one-year requirement and 70% continuing to live in Tulsa. The program spends roughly $15,000 per participant, including the incentive, administrative costs, and community benefits such as access to co-working spaces and other networking activities. 

A recent executive order from the White House aims to centralize federal grantmaking. This revamping of the grantmaking process would affect how decisions are made regarding the distribution of billions of dollars in research grants and have a significant impact on research universities.  While the order notes, “nothing in this order shall be construed to discourage or prevent the use of peer review methods,” it sidelines the peer review process with the disclaimer, “provided that peer review recommendations remain advisory” to the senior appointees. These senior appointees are directed to “use their independent judgment.”  All final grant award decisions across all agencies are to be made by political appointees. 

The dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) investments in venture capital (VC) has been a consistent storyline in the first half of 2025. PitchBook, Carta, Crunchbase, and many others have all pointed to the significant portion of investment dollars and deals flowing to AI companies. With the volume of companies, deals, and dollars involved, it is more than a spike in the usual cyclic nature of  VC investment.   As SSTI wrote in our review of Q1 venture capital investment activity, VC has been concentrating in larger deals. With market trends and mega deals in AI so well documented, we explore investment concentration from  deal size and geographic perspectives. As with prior analyses, we focus on deal sizes more relevant to TBED initiatives to help regional innovation leaders identify where they might find opportunities, face challenges, or set priorities in such a dynamic environment. Excluding the largest deals from our analysis appears to be increasing important, considering  PitchBook’s findings that just ten companies accounted for 41% of all venture dollars so far this year.  

Despite a decades-long decline in its share of American jobs, manufacturing remains a foundational part of the U.S. economy as the third largest contributor to its gross domestic product (GDP). Despite the sector’s share of overall U.S. employment declining over time, manufacturing continues to anchor many local economies. In this edition of Useful Stats, SSTI unveils trends shaping the manufacturing landscape, from areas of sustained growth to places undergoing structural change, by examining employment and establishment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) at the county level.